Google Play Services Now Turns Your Phone Into A Video Game Controller

Google has been active during Mobile World Congress 2015, and has announced a range of its plans for the year: launching unmanned drones to an update to the Google Play Service.

Before you stifle yawns at the mention of an “update,” this is not just another update. Google Service 7.0 lets you play around with your Android phone for multiple benefits, including the ability to turn your phone as a video game controller for your Android TV set-top box.

However, as keeping trend alive, we may not expect the update to roll out with immediate effect. So we can not really experiment with the accuracy and ease of use of the new features before they go live, unless previews are unveiled.

Google Play Games is now coming with a Nearby Connections API which will allow your Android based phone to act as a video game controller for the Android TV linked to the screen. And it will offer much more than the conventional A, B, Up, Down options: your Android phone will act as a second screen to your TV as well, even enabling you to de-clutter your main display.

So if you’re playing a first shooter game, the reality feel of having to physically move your head and hands to reload the gun is either going to be exciting or frustrating, depending which side of the winning game you’re on.

Apart from the Google Play Games update, Google has announced the following changes:

Location Settings Dialog
It combines multiple sensors to accurately provide you with the location, which will obviously depend on your GPS, WiFi, and cellular network settings. A standard mechanism will be enforced to check that the necessary location settings are enabled for a given LocationRequest to succeed.

Places API
With the Places API, you can now simply pick a place from Google’s databases of locations, and it will automatically provide all the relevant details of the location like name, address, phone number and website.

Google Fit
Google Fit has now made health and fitness apps easier to create, by extracting sensor data like current location and speed, storing activity data in Google Fit’s open platform, and then automatically summarizing the data into a single view of the user’s fitness data.

Further features being added to the Google Play Services 7.0 version include App indexing, Google Mobile Ads SDK and changes to the GoogleApiClient.